From Nature:
Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have found a way to get a common lithium compound to release and take up lithium ions in a matter of seconds. The compound, which is already used in the electrodes of some commercial lithium-ion batteries, might lead to laptop batteries capable of charging themselves in about a minute. The work appears in Nature1 this week.
My laptop is diesel-powered, so I can already refill it in about 2 seconds.
Read more on it here
OK, so you have a 500mAh Li-ion battery in your cell phone that can be charged in 10 seconds…
Lets see what current you need to charge it in 10 seconds…
Idealizing how Li-ion actually charges you need 500mA for 3600 seconds… or 1000mA for 1800 seconds… or 180 Amps for 10 seconds.
180 Amps.
So, uh, where are you getting 180A from? Think your mini-usb connector will handle that? That’s more current than a car starter pulls and they use half inch diameter wire.
There is almost no point in having charge rates this fast and cells designed for this are exceptionally dangerous during crush and nail penetration testing. Li-ion chemists are some of the most careful people I have ever met.
@ Adralien: that just means that the limit on the charging rate would set, not by the battery’s charge rate, but by the capacity of the charging system and safety considerations.
So in practice we’d be talking minutes rather than seconds.
adralien, consider that batteries are used in more than cell-phones. That nifty forklift a few posts down, for example.
@5 Sorry, same problem… now you have a 1000Ah battery that will require MegaAmps to charge in minutes. Copper wire diameter probably measured in feet.
@4 Yes, but no, still need wire diameters way above what a consumer device will support (and the power supply to match). Even for 5A you will need a laptop sized wall adapter to charge your cellphone.
Overall it’s not worth the safety risks, there’s nothing wrong with existing Li-ion that this fixes.